Remembering Ravi Shankar, 1920-2012

Dec. 11, 2012

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Legendary Indian musician Ravi Shankar, who died Tuesday at 92, is seen here performing during the opening day of the Paleo Festival in Nyon, Switzerland, July 2005. SANDRO CAMPARDO, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Ravi Shankar, who died Tuesday at 92, in a photo from February 2002. AJIT KUMAR, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Ravi Shankar was pulled into the spotlight in the late '60s when George Harrison and the Beatles were influenced by the music he played on an ancient musical instrument, the sitar. He's seen here in June 1985. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Ravi Shankar, then 78, poses at his home in New Delhi, India, in front of a 1969 portrait of himself in this March 6, 1998, photo. The following year, Shankar was awarded the country's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna. JOHN MCCONNICO, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Polar Musical Prize winners Ray Charles, left, and Ravi Shankar share a laugh in May 1998 during a news conference at the Stockholm Grand Hotel. TOBIAS ROSTLUND, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, left, and his daughter Anoushka Shankar are seen at the shooting of a film endorsing the strengthening of Indian laws against animal cruelty in New Delhi, February 2002. GURINDER OSAN, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, right, and daughter Anoushka Shankar smile during a news conference in Calcutta, India, December 2002. Shankar was also father to Grammy-winning jazz-pop chanteuse Norah Jones, though they were estranged for many years. BIKAS DAS, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Legendary Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar plays the sitar during a concert in New Delhi, India, March 2006. RAJESH KUMAR SINGH, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ravi Shankar performs during the opening day of the Paleo Festival in Nyon, Switzerland, July 2005. SANDRO CAMPARDO, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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George Harrison of the Beatles sits cross-legged with sitar mentor Ravi Shankar in Los Angeles, August 1967. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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George Harrison, left, is shown speaking to Ravi Shankar at a press conference at the ABKCO Industries offices in New York, July 1971, where he announced a benefit concert for Bangladesh refugees. MARTY LEDERHANDLER, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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U.S. President Gerald Ford smiles as he talks with George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, bottom right, at the White House, December 1974. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Ravi Shankar playing his sitar, 1967. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Ravi Shankar, who died Tuesday at 92, is seen here with his instrument in November 1968. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Ravi Shankar in January 1971 before a concert at London's Festival Hall. LAWRENCE HARRIS, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Legendary Indian musician Ravi Shankar, who died Tuesday at 92, is seen here performing during the opening day of the Paleo Festival in Nyon, Switzerland, July 2005.SANDRO CAMPARDO, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist and composer whose collaborations with Western classical musicians as well as rock stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of India's traditional music, died Tuesday in a hospital near his home in Southern California. He was 92.

Shankar had suffered from upper respiratory and heart ailments in the last year and underwent heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday, his family said in a statement.

Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose performance style embodied a virtuosity that transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.

His instrument, the sitar, has a small rounded body and a long neck with a resonating gourd at the top. It has six melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings (which are not played but resonate freely as the other strings are plucked). Sitar performances are partly improvised, but the improvisations are strictly governed by a repertory of ragas (melodic patterns representing specific moods, times of day, seasons of the year or events) and talas (intricate rhythmic patterns) that date back several millenniums.

Shankar's quest for a Western audience was helped in 1965 when George Harrison of the Beatles began to study the sitar with him. But Harrison was not the first Western musician to seek Shankar's guidance. In 1952 he met and began performing with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he made three recordings for EMI: "West Meets East" (1967), "West Meets East, Vol. 2" (1968) and "Improvisations: East Meets West" (1977).

Shankar loved to mix the music of different cultures. He collaborated with the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal and the jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, who had become fascinated with Indian music and philosophy in the early '60s. Coltrane met with Shankar several times from 1964 to 1966 to learn the basics of ragas, talas and Indian improvisation techniques. Coltrane named his son Ravi after Shankar.

Shankar also collaborated with several prominent Japanese musicians – Hozan Yamamoto, a shakuhachi player, and Susumu Miyashita, a koto player – on "East Greets East," a 1978 recording in which Indian and Japanese influences intermingled.

In addition to his frequent tours as a sitarist Shankar was a prolific composer of film music (including the score for Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" in 1982), ballets, electronic works and concertos for sitar and Western orchestras.

In 1988 his seven-movement "Swar Milan" was performed at the Palace of Culture in Moscow by an ensemble of 140 musicians, including the Russian Folk Ensemble, members of the Moscow Philharmonic and the Ministry of Culture Chorus, as well as Shankar's own group of Indian musicians. And in 1990 he collaborated with the Minimalist composer Philip Glass – who had worked as his assistant on the film score for "Chappaqua" in the late 1960s – on "Passages," a recording of works he and Glass composed for each other.

"I have always had an instinct for doing new things," Shankar said in 1985. "Call it good or bad, I love to experiment."

Ravi Shankar, whose formal name was Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, was born on April 7, 1920, in Varanasi, India, to a family of musicians and dancers. His older brother Uday directed a touring Indian dance troupe, which Ravi joined when he was 10. Within five years he had become one of the company's star soloists. He also discovered that he had a facility with the sitar and the sarod, another stringed instrument, as well as the flute and the tabla, an Indian drum.

The idea of helping Western listeners appreciate the intricacies of Indian music occurred to him during his years as a dancer.

"My brother had a house in Paris," he recalled in one interview. "To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: `Indian music,' they said, `is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own it is repetitious and monotonous.' They talked as if Indian music were an ethnic phenomenon, just another museum piece. Even when they were being decent and kind, I was furious. And at the same time sorry for them. Indian music was so rich and varied and deep. These people hadn't penetrated even the outer skin."

Shankar soon found, however, that as a young, self-taught musician he had not penetrated very deeply either. In 1936 an Indian court musician, Allaudin Khan, joined the company for a year and set Shankar on a different path.

"He was the first person frank enough to tell me that I had talent but that I was wasting it – that I was going nowhere, doing nothing," Shankar said. "Everyone else was full of praise, but he killed my ego and made me humble."

When Shankar asked Khan to teach him, he was told that he could learn to play the sitar only after he decided to give up the worldly life he was leading and devote himself fully to his studies. In 1937 Shankar gave up dancing, sold his Western clothes and returned to India to become a musician.

"I surrendered myself to the old way," he said, "and let me tell you, it was difficult for me to go from places like New York and Chicago to a remote village full of mosquitoes, bedbugs, lizards and snakes, with frogs croaking all night. I was just like a Western young man. But I overcame all that."

After studying with Khan for seven years and marrying his daughter, Annapurna, also a sitarist, Shankar began his performing career in India. In the 1940s he started bringing Eastern and Western currents together in ballet scores and incidental music for films, including Satyajit Ray's "Apu" trilogy, in the late 1950s. In 1949 he was appointed music director of All India Radio. There he formed the National Orchestra, an ensemble of both Indian and Western classical instruments.

Shankar became increasingly interested in touring outside India in the early 1950s. His appetite was whetted further when he undertook a tour of the Soviet Union in 1954 and was invited to perform in London and New York. But it wasn't until 1956 that he began spending long periods outside India. That year, he left his position at All India Radio and undertook tours of Europe and the United States.

Through his recitals, as well as recordings on the Columbia and World Pacific labels, Shankar built a Western following for the sitar. Interest in the instrument exploded in 1965, when Harrison encountered a sitar on the set of "Help!," the Beatles' second film. Intrigued by the instrument's complexity, he learned its rudiments and used it on a Beatles recording, "Norwegian Wood," that year.

The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Byrds and other rock groups quickly followed suit, although few went as far as Harrison, who recorded several songs that appeared on Beatles albums with Indian musicians, rather than his band mates. By the summer of 1967 the sitar was in vogue in the rock world.

At first Shankar reveled in the attention his connection with popular culture brought him, and he performed for huge audiences at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969. He also performed, with the tabla virtuoso Alla Rakha and the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan, at an all-star concert at Madison Square Garden in 1971 that Harrison organized to help Shankar raise money for the victims of political upheaval in Bangladesh.

Shankar eventually came to regard his participation in rock festivals as a mistake. Looking back at that era, he said he deplored the use of his music, which has its roots in an ancient spiritual tradition, as a backdrop for drug taking.

"On one hand," he said in a 1985 interview, "I was lucky to have been there at a time when society was changing. And although much of the hippie movement seemed superficial, there was also a lot of sincerity in it, and a tremendous amount of energy. What disturbed me, though, was the use of drugs and the mixing of drugs with our music. And I was hurt by the idea that our classical music was treated as a fad – something that is very common in Western countries.

"People would come to my concerts stoned, and they would sit in the audience drinking Coke and making out with their girlfriends. I found it very humiliating, and there were many times I picked up my sitar and walked away.

"I tried to make the young people sit properly and listen. I assured them that if they wanted to be high, I could make them feel high through the music, without drugs, if they'd only give me a chance. It was a terrible experience at the time.

"But you know, many of those young people still come to our concerts. They have matured, they are free from drugs, and they have a better attitude. And this makes me happy that I went through all that. I have come full circle."

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